Girl in a Cafe my arse. This was Imperialism in a Hotel.
Stuart Hodkinson.
For those unfortunate enough to have just sat through Richard Curtis's (a.k.a. 'Bob with a brain') ridiculous BBC TV film, The Girl in the Cafe, about a pretend G8 summit in a Reykjavik hotel, I'm afraid I have some bad news. Yes, you really did just watch a jingoistic political broadcast on behalf of New Labour. Yes, she really did interrupt the PM's speech at the G8 dinner by clicking her fingers every 3 seconds to mark a child dying of extreme poverty in Africa. And no, you really didn't learn a single thing about the causes of that poverty, the culpability of the present UK government and the destructive role of the G8 in the world.
Stuart Hodkinson.
For those unfortunate enough to have just sat through Richard Curtis's (a.k.a. 'Bob with a brain') ridiculous BBC TV film, The Girl in the Cafe, about a pretend G8 summit in a Reykjavik hotel, I'm afraid I have some bad news. Yes, you really did just watch a jingoistic political broadcast on behalf of New Labour. Yes, she really did interrupt the PM's speech at the G8 dinner by clicking her fingers every 3 seconds to mark a child dying of extreme poverty in Africa. And no, you really didn't learn a single thing about the causes of that poverty, the culpability of the present UK government and the destructive role of the G8 in the world.
What a load of self-indulgent, hand-wringing, revisionist crap. Girl in a Cafe? This was 'Imperialism in a Hotel', jam-packed with appalling stereotypes, cliched script-writing and an unapologetic exposition of Africa as the 'dark continent', plagued by hunger, poverty, disease and corruption, but 'saveable' by 8 men in a room if they were to only dare to cleanse their consciences and 'make poverty history' (and in so doing secure their own place in history). At least we now know who writes Bono and Geldof's speeches. No doubt a knighthood will soon follow, although the only gong Curtis should be getting is the honorary Rudyard Kipling 'White Man's Burden' award.
You think I'm going a tad overboard, don't you? Well, I am prone to the odd hyperbolised rant, but not this time, no way. This film epitomised everything wrong with the star-fucking Celebdaq world of the Make Poverty History and Live 8 campaigns. On Planet Hollywood, it is the world's leaders who eliminate poverty and hunger - ordinary people mobilised in mass movements from below is not in the script. As for Africa, its sole problem - and the only thing we should be interested in - is lots of people just dying from poverty. The 'history of poverty' mustn't be discussed. Oh no, don't bore yourself with that one, implies Curtis. After all, as William, the Gordon Brown-style Chancellor in the film says, "these issues are very complex". Instead, just accept that poverty exists in Africa on a huge scale and that G8 leaders can fix it by changing trade rules, or giving more aid in return for better governance. Because in the Curtis world of development economics, it's as easy as 'A' 'D' 'T' - 'aid', 'trade' and debt'.
But shorn of their interrelationship with power and class relations under global capitalism, these three concepts are utterly meaningless. The reality, as even a star-gazing Oxfam campaigner will tell you, is that Bush and Blair will never simply re-write trade rules or drop debt or boost aid in a moment of guilt-wracked weakness. These structures exist to perpetuate and augment the wealth of global elites. And even if they thought about doing it, multinational corporations would veto such changes anyway. To change the world, you have to challenge the very ideological and material structures of the system itself, something that campaigns led by millionaire rock and film stars whose status and power comes from that system will never do.
Some people are going to look a little bit silly now, like the normally astute Madelaine Bunting. Writing in the Grauniad last week, Bunting implied Curtis was going to make "the cynics and sceptics" eat their words because The Girl in the Cafe would explain the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to "a primetime audience in a way that decades of campaigning have failed to do". Madelaine, did you actually watch the film or just read the press release? We got about 20 seconds on the MDGs before the sickly and totally improbable love story took over. The only thing we learned was that the goals include "halving extreme world poverty by 2015". Wow - thanks Rich for that. And how are they going to achieve this goal? Why only half? Why by 2015? Predictably, there was no answer to these more probing questions, probably because they require explanations beyond the clicking of fingers.
Curtis could have weaved into the script the beginnings of colonialism and the slave trade, through to the decades following independence when the ex-colonial powers reasserted their control through creating the debt slavery system, and to the present day with G8 countries and their corporations queuing up to benefit from what Yao Graham has called in this month's Red Pepper, "the new scramble for Africa". But that would have involved knowing about this in the first place. However, I'm being too hard on Curtis. I mean, c'mon, the BBC was competing with Big Brother for primetime viewing and the truth about the West's looting and burning of Africa just doesn't make good saturday night telly, now does it.
http://redpepper.blogs.com/g8/2005/06/girl_in_a_cafe_.html#more
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